Mac users will be familiar with a software feature called Time Machine. While the name oversells its functionality somewhat (you won’t be changing global history, unless you happen to be extremely important), it is still a figurative lifesaver on a smaller scale, letting you roll back to a previous day via frequent Mac backups. Back to a time before you did something stupid and broke everything.
Well, I did something stupid on another Apple product, albeit something actively recommended by the company. I upgraded my iPhone 14 Pro to iOS 26.
To be clear, it’s not something I wanted to do. I’ve worked in consumer technology journalism long enough to know that being an early adopter is often like being a beta tester without the pay or employment benefits.
Far better to wait a few months until everything is running smoothly and then make the jump to new software — especially if everything is already working well for you. Why rock the boat?
It wasn’t even curiosity that got me on this occasion: it was, regrettably, work. I was given a pair of Beats Powerbeats Fit to review, and as soon as I connected them to my iPhone, a pop up box informed me that I would need to upgrade to iOS 26 in order to utilize all the features.
“Oh well,” I thought, repressing my well honed instincts to maintain the status quo. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”. I was soon to find out that some rhetorical questions can indeed be answered.
The worst things that can happen
My iPhone rattled through the download quickly enough, and everything seemed to be working. The Apple logo filled the screen, accompanied by a reassuring status bar that smoothly filled over the space of a few minutes.
Before I knew it, I was in the brave new world of iOS 26… which looked a lot like iOS 18, despite the eight digit jump. To be clear, I haven’t recently awoken from a coma: Apple skipped versions 19 through 25 in order to bring the numbers both in line with its other products, and the year of release.
Anyway, first impressions were okay. The Liquid Glass transparency looked nice enough, even if it did feel a bit like using someone else’s phone. That wasn’t helped by the first iOS 26 issue I noticed: the large, friendly Reddit widget on my homepage which shows pictures from r/cats along with the date. It was replaced with a box saying “Sorry, this widget isn’t working” without a feline in sight.
As a simple man with simple pleasures, this upset me far more than it should, and I wasn’t the only one, with a handful of Reddit threads expressing the same problem.
One solution worked — enabling Larger Text mode in the iPhone’s settings — but I lasted less than a day with the big-print version of iOS before I decided that seeing cats wasn’t worth the depressing preview of my eyesight’s long-term trajectory, so I reluctantly reverted.
The next iOS 26 problems I noticed were more irritating than serious. I spotted that WhatsApp — my main communication platform — was sometimes behaving strangely, showing a big blank space between the keyboard and the messages, like this.
This seems to be a problem with third-party keyboards on iOS 26, and the advice is to wait for an update. Unfortunately, I use Gboard, and Google hasn’t patched it in three years, so I may be waiting a long time.
My muscle memory was also irritated by the share button layout changing. Pushing a compatible paywalled website through to Apple News — a process I’d confined to muscle memory — now had a different route, and why was the option to “Find products on Amazon” suddenly so prominent? If I want to find products on Amazon, I’m perfectly capable of, y’know, searching Amazon.com.
Then there were the things that could have caused me massive problems. First, I was kicked out of a publisher’s Slack account without warning. Normally, I get messages from Slackbot telling me my account is close to expiry so I can renew, but on this occasion, no notification came through — or, no less damning, I missed it for the first time in five years working with the company.
Then, for the first time since joining my mobile network last February, I used up all my data just one week after updating to iOS 26. Given this hadn’t happened in the preceding 19 months, I figured the update had to be to blame, and sure enough I found that iCloud syncing over mobile data was recklessly enabled.
Unlike the other iOS 26 issues, I’ve not seen anybody else reporting this particular cause, though people flagged abnormally high data use with the beta. In any case, I’d gone 19 months without overshooting my data allowance, and I managed it a week after upgrading to iOS 26 which feels like quite the coincidence. I had to buy a couple of extra gigabytes to get me through the week before it reset.
I’m not the only one with issues. A quick browse of Reddit finds threads with titles like “iOS 26 is by far the buggiest update I’ve ever used” and “iOS 26 is UNFINISHED and I’m tired to [sic.] pretend it’s not.” In the greater scheme of things — data use aside — my experience hasn’t been too bad, when others are complaining about degraded battery life, camera failures, connectivity problems and poor performance on older handsets. But it still makes a mockery of Apple’s old “It just works” mantra.
No way back
With my Powerbeats Fit review almost done, I began dreaming of reverting to iOS 18… only to find that Apple closed that door a month ago, no longer signing and verifying the files. The only credible solution I’ve seen is a bit silly: buying another iPhone that hasn’t yet been upgraded to iOS 26, and selling my current one.
I’m not that desperate. Things are beginning to settle down now: the Reddit widget has been patched and works well enough, I’ve only used 500MB of my 15GB package in the five days since my data renewed, and I’ve even stopped rolling my eyes when the third-party keyboard bug rears its ugly head. No doubt things will get smoother as Apple rolls out more updates, and all this will be forgotten in a few months.
But for now, while the bitter taste is still fresh, I’ve relearned a very important lesson: it simply doesn’t pay to be an early adopter, no matter how shiny an upgrade looks.
